Underneath the famous Muppet Theatre, oil has been discovered. Tex Richman, an oilman, finds out and plans to demolish the theatre so he can start drilling. Walter, Gary and Mary are three friends who also happen to be huge fans of The Muppets. They plan to stage what they call 'The Greatest Muppet Telethon Ever', so they can raise $10 million to stop the destruction of the Muppet Theatre.

In the new political documentary Our Brand is Crisis - or, as it could have been named, James Carville and Friends Go To Bolivia! - a team of blue-shirt and khaki-pants D.C. consultants head south to help run the 2002 presidential campaign of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, aka "Goni." A cursory glance at the headlines which have been coming out of Bolivia recently is all the clue you need to see how well that turned out for the consultants, Goni, and the country in general.

The election documentary is a rich field for the non-fiction genre, melding the fly-on-the-wall recordings of nuts-and-bolts decision-making - all those backroom discussions normally never seen by the electorate - with the built-in drama of an impending popular contest. With her first feature release, director Rachel Boynton has chosen her subject perfectly and handles it just about as well, landing Our Brand is Crisis in the company of films like The War Room and the more lighthearted Journeys with George.

Favorite thing about this classic Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign: Listening to James Carville's Louisiana twang for two hours. The pair of documentarians (who offer no commentary at all; the film speaks for itself entirely) gain amazing insight into the political process, the minutiae of how the campaigners attempt to build stories for the press, how speeches are written, and how genuinely hateful the opposing parties are against each other. Fortunately for Carville and company, their man Clinton won the day; this would have been a savage film if it hadn't panned out. I'm apolitical and despise politics -- but looking back at this campaign 12 years after the fact is actually a little nostalgic and surprisingly fun. Now gimme more Carville!

Juliette Lewis garners a few weak grins in an opening-scene cameo as the promiscuous live-in girlfriend of Luke Wilson -- the movie's central loser. It's her half-baked apology, after he walks in on a blindfold-centric threesome in their bedroom, which prompts him to move to his own place half a block from a university campus.

He's joined by two buddies also made miserable by the women in their lives -- "Saturday Night Live"-spawned one-trick geek Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, who plays a charmless, potbellied soccer-dad version of his smug "Swingers" persona -- and it isn't long before these two resolve to turn their Wilson's new pad into the party-hardy frat for the nearby campus.